Boundaries of Order by Butler Shaffer is in that tradition, a completely fresh look at a marvelous intellectual apparatus by a mature intellectual who has been writing on law, economics, and history for four decades. It is the treatise on liberty and property for the digital age, one written in the Rothbardian/Hayekian tradition but with a unique perspective on how the great struggle between state and society is playing itself out in our times.
What's striking is how this is not a book that merely bemoans a bygone era. In fact, Shaffer's view is that the state itself represents a bygone era, ruling with dated ideas over a world that no longer exists. Reality is at once hyper-localized and hyper-internationalized with the two ends of the spectrum connected through digital communication and infinitely complex forms of ownership that never stop yielding unpredictable change.
Shaffer argues is that we are living in a world of glorious upheaval, managed in an orderly way by virtue of individual volition and property ownership. The state is not part of this path of progress and only works to impede it temporarily and at terrible cost. Meanwhile, the political is ever less relevant for people in the course of their daily lives. It does not help us accomplish the ends we seek to achieve. In this way, he strengthens the case against the state, and intensifies it in our times: the sheer complexity of the social order stands to utterly defy any attempts to control it.
The book is at once deeply radical and penetratingly optimistic about the future. He helps us to imagine that the withering away of the state will not bring cataclysm but simply more of what we love and what we find useful and less of what we do not love and what we do not find useful. One comes away from this work with an intense awareness of the great dividing line-too often made invisible by disinformation-that separates power relations from power relations.
